The things we do for our friends! Picture the scene - an active business-owner with limited free hours keen to broaden her network and meet new people. Of the opposite sex, because making friends and having adventures with her own gender falls easily to her.
Courageously, she (let's call her A. Nony) decides to take the high-tech road and offer herself up to the internet matchmaking services. A. Nony is bright, interesting, creative, fit, fun and seriously attractive but like many, found it difficult to describe herself in the tedious 'About me' sections so she called upon a friend to help. Me.
A. Nony has style - not for her a phone call plea, I was invited out for coffee and bribed asked to assist in return for a bottle of bubbly. Deal! Bargain on my side because she's an easy sell. NO, not like that! Her extensive list of fine qualities flowed effortlessly from the keyboard and I 'fess that it was the easiest bottle of fizz I've ever earned.
Bravely, A. Nony placed herself front and centre in what I like to call the Fresh Produce Market of Love and settled down to wait for the responses to dash in.
She waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And gave up.
The months passed and the FPML fell out of mind until during some girly support chat with another well-read and learned friend A. Nony decided to try again.
I TOLD you she has nuts!
A. Nony dropped me a note to update me about her plans. With the assistance of the friend and no small quantity of wine, various male profiles were perused, discussed and, truth be told, discarded.
I was irked, it's true. A. Nony enriches all with her bright, sunny and engaging company and should be snapped up by anybody genuinely interested in meeting an independent woman of substance. She's a quality gem and I felt driven to get involved and make things happen. It's what we women do for each other!
'Research' is an intellectual word to describe 'googling' and internet snooping but research the market I did. The UK's Top 10 Internet Dating Sites. Better still - Best Dating Sites in the World. Yup, I was thinking big.
In the interests of gleaning as much valuable info as possible and taking one for the team before reporting back, I joined a highly recommended, international site and completed the odious profile required. It stopped short of my blood group and I think the site ended up knowing more about me than my family or therapist. Forget the Fresh Produce Market of Love - I was gutted and splayed out like a salmon fillet in a Fish Market of Desperation.
PING! Within an hour, the notifications began rolling in. Martin in Tottenham. Peter from Oxford. Kyle of Texas. Quentin in Queensland. Bingo - the trick is to think REALLY big, on a global scale.
Excitedly, I let A. Nony in on my findings. "You're fishing in too small a pond. Set the filters to International and see what comes in. Worst case, you get an overseas holiday out of it to meet face to face."
"Well," she rejoined. "I've touched base with someone living a few hours away. He gets an opportunity to engage my brain and who knows? If he lives up to his chat he could be a winner, he sounds intelligent and witty."
"Yeah, but Peter from Oxford is a Biomedical SCIENTIST! Think bigger. Global scale. Out there are men who know that a woman's largest sensual organ is between her ears, not her flaps!"
"Write a blog. I dare you. Meanwhile, I'll keep things on a smaller scale, thank you." This lady is not for turning.
Ah, well, perhaps A. Nony has a point. Baby steps, darling. Baby steps.
Today, loving local. Tomorrow - the world!
Collaboration is a noun that I love. To me, it oozes positive energy and a willingness to work together with a strength lacking in the pallid synonyms 'partnership', 'team' or 'alliance'.
Say 'collaborator' and the noun sours like last week's milk. 'Collaborator' carries enough weighty baggage to sink Titanic II even faster than her predecessor. Images of roughly-shorn French women, swastikas tarred on their faces and chests, stripped to the waist and paraded in front of jeering crowds coil insidiously around the letters.
C O L L A B O R A T O R.
Nasty.
Cue the superb Jersey War Tunnels, the finest museum I've ever visited. Walk through the achingly cold corridors dripping with moisture; stare down unfinished tunnels that echo with heavy falls of water from the ground 34 metres above. Listen to the recorded sounds of slaves hacking into the shale rock, explosions and rock falls. You are no longer an audience, you are standing in the tunnels as they are hacked into the hill; your breathing speeds up and your heart pounds with...fear. The experience is so real that 77 years drop away and you are THERE. I'm not ashamed to confess that I was frightened at times and the awful sounds of war and hard labour banging around the chilly walls were beyond disturbing. Turning tail and getting out was tempting; it was way too easy to imagine what the slaves and forced labour endured in the construction.
Setting all that aside, the museum curators have identified the Jersey collaborators and recounted stories of their collaboration and their fate after the war. Beyond that, the curators have gone to extreme lengths to challenge visitors to put themselves in those shoes and make their own decisions on whether to defy or to collaborate with the German occupiers. Scenarios are posed and you are asked to 'vote' on whether you would have denounced someone in that situation.
It's a brilliant perspective to present, throwing the judgement grenade right back at the audience. No, I didn't vote on any of the scenarios although I read them through carefully and considered what I may have done but truth be told, it's an impossible question to answer. I know the outcome of the war. I've had years of exposure to books and films about the war, both fiction and non. The extent of the Third Reich's evil abominations are known to me and I've never personally endured such deprivation, suffering and horror. I simply cannot put myself in the shoes of someone facing those decisions and it would be sanctimonious and hypocritical for me to make those choices now.
To balance the equation (and another reason why this truly is a great museum) visitors are presented with four situations - all involving decent, handsome, presentable and polite young German soldiers. Would you let your child accept an ice-cream from one? Invite another to sit at your fireside and smoke his pipe while talking fishing? Respond to a polite greeting from a third on the street? Take in a soldier's laundry in exchange for extra food rations?
SLAP! There you have it. The average German soldier wasn't an evil beast or a pompous fool. He was YOUR son, brother, husband, father. Far from home, lonely and missing his family, his children, his friends and his life. Fighting because it was his patriotic duty or he was conscripted (don't allow the 'I was following orders' cop-out to dilute the sincerity of hundreds of thousands of soldiers fulfilling their national obligation and obedience).
Imagine this, if you will. In 1940, England left the Channel Islands to fend for themselves and, with access to information on the isolated islands restricted to German propaganda with odd titbits from the Allies, islanders didn't know what was going on. THEIR war was lost, they were ruled by Germany and as the years ticked by, what were their options? The last real news they got from the outside was the British call for boats from the island to assist the retreat from Dunkirk. Then they were told England had abandoned the islands and were given 24 hours to pack up their homes and lives and hop on a boat heading to Southampton and what was to most of them, a strange land.
From 1st July 1940 life changed staggeringly for those that chose to stay and those that didn't manage to board one of the ships as the Occupation began. A new government, currency, time zone, laws - even the side of the road you drove on changed.
Hope, faith and confidence can only take you so far. It's human nature to adapt and carry on - evolution happens in daily life, not just in millennia. By the time January 1st 1944 rolled around, how many islanders in all honesty still believed the Allies would win the war? How many had truly accepted that this was how it was going to be forever and got on with living as normal a life as possible?
Polite, handsome soldiers willing to lend a hand with a bit of heavy work or share some badly needed rations and treats probably didn't seem much of an ogre any more. Would it harm to accept an ice-cream or go to a dance in the mess hall? At that point in time, did fraternisation wear the stench of 'collaboration'?
The overwhelming message shared in the tunnels was to NOT judge the choices of others. Those who suffered terrible deprivation at best and lost loved ones at worst naturally agonised at others enjoying the fruits of fraternisation and collaboration. Yet if the war had ended differently the diverse choices would have been viewed through a different lens.
Anger, frustration, pain and vengeance make bitter bedfellows. However, it is extremely difficult to understand someone's decision to denounce a neighbour, knowing it would lead to certain deportation and possible death for hiding an illegal radio.
But what if the collaborator, after so many years of war...
- was protecting/providing needed food or medication for someone,
- genuinely fell in love with a soldier,
- sincerely believed that the war was over, won by the enemy, and making the best of a new life,
- was threatened or had family threatened to force cooperation,
- was promised news/release of a captured family member,
- actually admired Germany / wasn't loyal to Great Britain BEFORE the war,
- felt abandoned by England and changed loyalties,
- was unaware of the horrors of German 'Lebensraum' and how it turned Europe into a slaughterhouse.
Every collaborator had their own reasons for their choice just as every resistance member had theirs. There are two vantage points in history - victor and vanquished - with groups of people behind each point. Post-war, we have the luxury of looking back and pointing fingers - we know how the story ends. We know about the Holocaust and the unspeakable insanity of Germany's leadership. Our knowledge gives us a wider assortment of options to make informed choices. But if the jackboot was on the other foot and the Axis powers had overpowered and conquered all, our view of collaborators would be different today.
The War Tunnel curators are to be applauded for bridging the community divide upon a small island, a divide which saw family, friends and neighbours skewered on opposing sides. In South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu bravely headed up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in an attempt to uncork boiling emotions and safely release the power of healing into South African society. Rwanda found a unique way to repair, reconnect and remedy the trauma and suffering of the 1994 genocide.
The tender shoots to find peace and create a future after unspeakable cruelty, horror and trauma are rooted in a non-judgemental and empathetic look at motive. What drove the decisions made by ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances?
It's a useful rule of thumb to adopt across much more than global warfare. From family conflict to ethnic violence, does understanding the opposing point of view feature strongly enough in resolution efforts? I fear that too often, we simply run out of steam and/or resources and limp to an exhausted halt. Reparations, bitterness and revenge (key factors in the eruption of WWII) then become the order of the day.
If we understood why people sleep with the enemy, would our social empathy grow beyond the need for enemies?
